Let The Long Grey Line March On

December 16, 1985

BENJAMIN SCHEMMER, a West Point graduate and editor of the Armed Forces Journal, finds the West Point assembly line, at $225,000 per model, needlessly expensive. He suggests in a story printed in the Sentinel's Insight section that because ROTC produces 74 percent of current Army officer output at far less cost than West Point, it should, along with Officer Candidate School, take over the military academy's job.

Such a proposal requires a closer look at ROTC, which enjoys a surprising measure of public support. It was not always thus. Battered every time some campus creeps needed a handy target during the Vietnam War, the program developed a siege mentality.

If ROTC is to take up the slack from a phase-out of service academies, it will need to be armored against the sticks and stones that wing through the academic groves during a police action or war.

This means no torching the drill hall, no harassing cadets, no banning of campus parades or weapons and no equivocating on ROTC issues by college leaders, trustees, state legislators or Congress.

It means re-establishing ROTC on the many campuses from which it had been driven, including those private ones that considered themselves above preparing officers to battle, if not above the battle itself.

This is too much to expect. Perhaps we had best, Hamletlike, live with the ills we have and let The Long Grey Line march expensively on.